The school year for 2010-11 has started, or is about to, across the nation. Some states and districts will begin the day after Labor Day. Others started very close to the beginning of August, a horrible thing to do of course, but there you have it.

The school year is starting off under staffed, under funded, and largely under prepared to deal with the lack of support for education in general. In previous posts, the Eduskeptic has pointed out that, in most instances, schools are opening with fewer teachers, which results in larger class sizes. There are fewer librarians, library aides/techs, library hours, or libraries at all. Music, art, and sports have all taken massive hits.

Some districts have chosen to simply eliminate libraries at their schools. This has happened across the US. In having to cut back, due to a lack of funding, districts have had to make some very difficult choices.

From Kindergarten to third grade the focus is on skills, reading being the one that is given the most emphasis and press. It is a simple connection: if a child cannot read, or comprehend what he or she is reading, everything past that point stops. What teachers in these grades are aiming at is automaticity. A child who has letter recognition and sounds internalized, who doesn’t need to decode each and every letter, sound, and combinations thereof, is likely to be able to understand what the sentence is about. This is called automaticity, and understanding the meaning of the sentence or paragraph comes along with it. A child who is struggling to put the letters and sounds together gets to the end of the sentence with just about nothing but a jumble of letters and sounds, disconnected completely from the meaning of the sentence. It’s a simple premise.

Oddly, one of the best ways to reach a level of automaticity is to read constantly, or listen to others reading. In order to do this, one needs magazines, and books. Last time the Eduskeptic checked, these items were housed in the library.

Children, most of them anyway, love libraries. Teachers of young children know this. They, and the Eduskeptic is one of them, tell children that the entire universe is in the library, that they may learn anything, or travel anywhere, just by opening a book. It’s true. While the Eduskeptic has just retired from teaching (36 years, 24 in Kindergarten), the joy that is obvious when young children get to the library is still quite stunning. Those who don’t read yet make up their own stories looking at the illustrations. Those who do read use the illustrations to further their enjoyment of reading.

There is a very short time to get all of this across to the young ones. If it isn’t done by third grade, it probably won’t get done. Children who are behind in reading at this point face a very steep climb to automaticity and understanding. Fourth grade is the first content based grade, and reading is a stone cold requirement here.

It is incredible that in the United States, arguably one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations on this planet, that schools are forced to choose between keeping teachers in classrooms, with ever more children, or curtailing or closing the school libraries. The pure stupidity of it defies reason.